The Owlcroft Company Home Page

(The Owlcroft Company, a Washington State corporation.)

The Owlcroft Company Home Page

The Owlcroft Company

The Owlcroft Company owns and operates a number of web sites on a broad variety of topics. These sites are all designed to be both useful and pleasant to visit: their page layouts are intended to avoid the squeezed, small-type, multi-column, ad-cluttered, blinking-light, zooming-image visual nightmare that so many of today's sites have become. Owlcroft sites are meant as places where you can calmly relax and enjoy your visit while yet getting helped to a generous dose of information on the sites' topics.

Given below is a list of those sites, separated into two categories: those operated under their own domain names and those existing within the owlcroft.com domain. Included for each is a brief description of that site's topic.

Free-Standing Web Sites Owned and Operated by The Owlcroft Company

Induction is a wholly different method of cooking, and this site explains in full what it is,
how it works, what its advantages are (it is simply the best cooking technology there
is, for both professional and home cooking), and who makes units today. Induction, long popular
around the world, is finally having a resurgence in North America, with new name-brand units
appearing; people who want to know why will find out at this leading internet resource site.

The site also has an extensive
bookshop (with both new and
used books available) of titles relating to cooking.

Whether you are a veteran wine drinker or a complete novice, you should find this site quite,
well, useful. It has information pages on each of about 150 major wine grapes, from
Agiorgitiko to Zierfandler, telling about the grape, what wine from it is like, and—the
crux—several examples of such wine each under $20 and each recommended by numerous wine
critics, professional and amateur: this site is not one person's or a few individuals' personal
tastes, it is "data mining" of consensus critical opinion. Using it, you can sample a variety
knowing you are drinking what a lot of people consider a fine example of it, yet one that doesn't
break the bank. The site also includes numerous pages of general wine-drinking and
wine-buying advice and information.

The site also has an extensive
bookshop (with both new and
used books available) of titles relating to wine.

For the civilized reader, too many--most--web sites about science-fiction or fantasy
literature recall American Bandstand: "Uh, wull, Dick, I give it a 86 'cause it had a good
beat an' yuh could dance to it." What one might charitably call "naive enthusiasm" abounds.
But, while a cold spritzer is often welcome refreshment, when we go into a restaurant of
quality and ask for the wine card, we do not expect to see Gallo Chablis or Annie Greensprings
among the listings. This site seeks to be a wine card of science-fiction and fantasy
literature; it is dedicated to presenting works in the fields of science-fiction and
fantasy—sometimes collectively called "speculative fiction"—that get high grades
for literary quality without needing any bonus points just for being science fiction or
fantasy. The books are judged as literature, not as "science-fiction books" or "fantasy
books".

The site also has an extensive
bookshop (with both new and
used books available) of speculative-fiction titles.

From one of the pioneers of modern baseball analysis—a long-time consultant to
successful major-league ball clubs—comes this site, which not only explains thoroughly the
rationale and methodology of modern analysis, but presents detailed stats on teams and players
(updated daily in-season), allowing fans to see how much players are really helping
(or hurting) their team, and how well any team is really playing.

The site also has an extensive
bookshop (with both new and
used books available) of titles relating to baseball.

The mystery-crime-detection genre is—like most literary genres—regrettably
dominated by works lacking literary merit, and is indeed almost antagonistic toward such
works; yet authors of substantial merit have been (and are) producing works of enduring
value within the field. While this site does not pretend to be a comprehensive survey of
all that is literate within the genre, it does select and describe a good number of authors
and series that meet that criterion; moreover, it includes links to select further resources
in the field. Possibly most important of all, it also provides a complete listing of all
the books (and omnibuses) for each series, along with used-book searches for each title.

The site also has an extensive
bookshop (with
both new and used books available) of mystery/crime/detection titles.

A rich cornucopia of detailed information for home vegetable and fruit gardeners, the site
includes immensely detailed and exact growing information for a great variety of vegetables and
fruits—but above all it focuses on identifying the most flavorful varieties of
each; in an era of water-swollen "hybrid vigor", where heavier and harder are
the chief commercial criteria for edibles, the home gardener, who can pick those "cultivars"
that make the best eating, needs help sorting through all those "best ever!" claims
made for each and every variety in garden-seed catalogues, and this site provides that
much-needed guidance.

The site also has an extensive
bookshop (with
both new and used books available) of vegetable-growing titles.

Everything you think you know about steroids and other "performance-enhancing" drugs in
baseball is (almost certainly) wrong.

This fact-filled site draws extensively on the medical literature and detailed analysis of
actual statistics to get to the truths about what steroids do and don't do for
performance, whether any records are "tainted", what the extent and severity of medical side
effects really are, whether American youth is being led astray by ballplayer "role models", and
the formal ethics of performance-enhancing substance use in sports.

(This site is an outgrowth of the Owlcroft Baseball web site described above on this
page.)

Oxalic acid is a component of many common foods (notably dark-green leafy ones), and many
people have health-related concerns about it, because it is implicated in medical conditions
such as kidney stones and gout. The internet contains a lot of unscientific rubbish on the
topic; here are the facts.

The site also has an extensive
bookshop (with
both new and used books available) of titles concerning diet and health.

Owlcroft Company Web Sites Within the owlcroft.com Domain:

This little site is not so much about what correct English grammar and usage are as it is a
reasoned (but passionate) argument that there really is such a thing as "sound
English", and thus—necessarily—such a thing as unsound English. In a time when more
and more voices clamorously decry the existence of any sort of standards whatever (for English,
or anything), this site explains why care with our words is essential to us as individuals and
to our society and our very civilization.

The site also has a highly selective
bookshop
of titles concerning English grammar and usage.

While this site is a "guided tour" of the real, physical Owlcroft House—establishing
its location, environment, and design details, as well as its appearance outside and in—it
is in a more general sense an example of the effectiveness of solar design. The entire annual
heating "bill" for this 2000-square-foot-plus home not far from the Canadian border is
roughly one-fifth of one cord of wood!

The site also has an extensive
bookshop
of titles concerning solar-home design.

If you want to try a "simple" search at The Book Depository, you can do that right here. Enter any of one or more keywords, a full or partial book title, an author name, or an ISBN (or a mix of those), then press the <Enter> key:

Or, if you want to do a slightly more complex "advanced" search at The Book Depository, you can go direct to The Book Depository's search page (which will open in a new browser window or tab).